BuddyPress.org

You can use an xprofile field, I see no harm in it.

Of course, there are other ways.

I believe, by default, all xprofile fields under “Base” are required.

If you don’t want it required, create a new xprofile group to house this new field.

To check the xprofile value of this new field, you’ll have to do a little manipulation in PHP with it. You could use substr() to check for file extensions.

@blackphantom nope, I am absolutely positive that I have both the key fields filled in on the admin page. I even created new apps with new keys to test it out, but it made no difference. I still get the error when clicking the profile tweetstream user link.

Here is a screenshot of the admin area:

http://anointed.net/files/2010/03/tweetstream.jpg

All in all, here’s my approach that I use on MU/BP sites ~

1) modify the register/register.php wp-signup.php hardcoded default text and url slugs.

2) enable xprofile and require additional fields upon registration.

2) use a captcha ~ i’m fond of ReCatcha

3) make sure you and check the NO setting under “Allow blog administrators to add new users to their blog via the Users->Add New page. ” in wp-admin/wpmu-options.php “Admin > Site Options”

4) I ban or limit the registration domains (also in Admin > Site Options) so that the commonly used spammer domains are blocked from registration and then I add an email contact for owners of these addresses to manually request registration. I hide the email address from bots with HiveLogic EnKoder

5) I then firewall off entire blocks of IP’s from my servers from commonly used spammer IP ranges you can find at sources like spamhaus.org .. and considering that these are one language sites, the need for access for the IP blocks on the pan asia network or eastern europe are unlikely. If you have a multilingual site, this might cause issues to very few users. Cpanel, Plesk, BSD, etc have tools to do this.. if you’re on a shared server, ask your hosting provider if they can do it for you, and they may be likely doing it already.

6) I also recommend using Askimet.

This is getting worse and worse. I just launched my first BuddyPress site and am getting spammer registrations although I have additional required profile fields and SI Captcha installed.

Sadly, the article mentioned (linked) above is not available anymore (I guess the spammers took down that site) and judging by the responses here there still seems to be no known solution to the spammer problem with WPMU/BuddyPress.

I spoke to someone on Twitter who confirmed that the spam problem started when activating BuddyPress – this would be in contradiction to remarks from Andy, I’m afraid. Anyhow: after reading comments here there seems to be a hole in the system somewhere.

(I guess the spammers have been clever enough not to spam testbp.org )

For more specific help you’d need to give more specific details –

i want to do all sorts of things to profile fields…..

… is a bit vague.

Also, you’re effectively asking someone to teach you how to write code. What you’re after probably requires a more in-depth answer than you’re likely to get here in the forums.

Perhaps you ought to download and break down / delve into the custom profile filters plugin and start from there – that’s an example of how to do these things in code – combined with the codex etc should get you started.

If you’re using the plugin I mentioned and you want to do exactly what you mentioned above, you could probably just add it into the SN arry in the plugin file, thus:

$social_networking_fields = array( // Enter the field ID of any field that prompts for the username to a social networking site, followed by the URL that must be appended to username to create a link to the user's profile on that site. Thus, since the URL for the profile of awesometwitteruser is twitter.com/awesometwitteruser, you should enter 'Twitter' => 'twitter.com/'. Don't forget: 1) Leave out the 'http://', 2) Include the trailing slash (/) if needed to make a valid URL, and 3) to separate items with commas

'Twitter' =>'twitter.com/' ,

'Delicious ID' => 'delicious.com/' ,

'YouTube ID ' => 'youtube.com/' ,

'Flickr ID ' =>'flickr.com/' ,

'FriendFeed ID' => 'friendfeed.com/',

'Facebook' => 'facebook.com/',

'MySpace' => 'myspace.com/',

// your site's Company Field

'Company' => 'google.co.uk/search?q='



);



// You shouldn't need to touch anything below this line.

Of course I haven’t actually tried this myself. The alternative is to extend the plugin a little with a function that takes that company field and does whatever you want to do with it.

This works great! But I am wondering if there is a way to have it call the value depending on the user that is currently logged-in.

I thought something like this might work… <?php echo bp_loggedinuser_xprofile_get_field_data(’10’); ?> but no such luck.

Any ideas?

There used to be the possibility to use pre-built fields to the registration form (as described here: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/what-happened-to-add-prebuilt-field), which would take care of at least part of this problem. But it appears this is no longer supported for 1.2.

So I definitely support the request for the ability to add pre-built registration fields.

Ahh sorry about that!

I thought you were talking about the registration page!

Move /bp-themes/bp-default/members/single/profile/profile-loop.php to your child theme and adjust.

Move the /bp-themes/registration/register.php to your child theme.

Edit as needed.

I have the same question

@Andy

sorry if my following questions are off-topic:

when I do create a “Private Group” on Group-creation:

– are the members-data who have joined this “Private-Group” visible to search-engines like Google ?

– are the user-images (avatar-images) and user-Profile-Fields of “Private-Group-Members” visible to search-engines ?

– is the user-activity (e.g. Permalink-comments) within a “Private Group” being exploited to search-engines or is it hidden from search-engines ?

– are all data from “Private-Groups” are actually hidden from other members within an installation ?

So if “Private Groups” would be hidden from search-engines, this would be perfect “Privacy” – just need to setup “Private-Groups” only, instead of “Public-Groups” ?

Many thanks.

I simply did the easy things. I added yes or no questions. I put in default profile fields they would have to answer and I added a date of birth field.

What I don’t understand is right now I have registrations closed and they are still signing up.

Registration has been closed for almost an hour and I still got 8 or 9 spam accounts over the last 40 minutes.

How is that possible?

just a note, nick.. .stop bumping your own posts after 2 minutes, they will not gain in popularity, they will just gain you some kick.

this is a good suggestion for a plugin, having chained selections is good… http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex16/chainedselects/index.htm and can be applied to a form if well built… you need a new interface for the custom fields to do so.

Not a security vulnerability, but looks like a value check is missing somewhere, I’ll fix this.

Privacy, advanced xprofile fields and front-end posting have to do with cleaning up loose ends in existing core functionality; access, member management, usability, etc. They are not in the same category as requesting a gallery or event management feature.

The polls are silly window dressing. The last one was largely ignored. Probably rightly so. We don’t pay Andy’s rent, Automattic does. Don’t pretend like we’re some hippy commune ruled by consensus.

– X-Profile Fields.

Surely you can add these at the registration phase – just make them “not required” and then users can fill them in later – so the registraion isn’t 10 hours long

Advanced Search for X-Profile-Fields was on the BP-Roadmap for 1.2, same as “Privacy-Features” and “User-Blogs-Posts from Front-end”. However those 3 features did not make it into BP1.2

I think most of the requested and discussed features on this Forum are Plugin-territory, but the mentioned 3 features should definitely be within Core and are essential to run a Social-Network-website:

– Privacy Features

– Advanced Search & X-Profile Fields

– User-Blogs-Posts from Front-end

I would even say:

STOP any further feature-polls for BP 1.3 and focus on above mentioned 3 features ONLY.